Simon Preston is pleased to present Verso Reverso, Jessica Mein's first solo exhibition in New York, which opens on Sunday 17 April and runs until Sunday 29 May, 2011. The show will comprise of work in various media, including video animation, books, drawing and collage.
The exhibition originates from the artist's interest in the increasingly obsolete paper billboards from her hometown of Sao Paulo. Using discarded billboard prints as a primary source material, Mein concentrates on its errors, glitches and folds - the break in the mechanical that renders it unique.
In a densely-layered animation, projected onto a single crumpled piece of paper, Mein has recorded an activity practically outlawed by recent visual anti-pollution laws; a laborer ascending and descending a ladder as he pastes sheets to an advertising hoarding. In cutting and splicing thousands of images together, the film re-animates this out-moded practice.
In a series of collages, salvaged billboard sheets are hole-punched and painstakingly collaged by hand, accentuating the faultiness inherent to the material. Efficiency and geometric form become interrupted by the handmade and mechanical error; while accident and imperfection are made implicit.A group of works on paper combine a minimal repetitive gesture with similar rigor. Tiny loops of ink compress and expand in regimented, structured repetition, echoing both the
paper folds and densely populated, formal compositions.
On the back wall, 36 hand-bound books
are installed as a grid to comprise Miopia. The cover of each unique book combines to form a
large, highly-produced advertisement. This image is broken into infinite
combinations of interruptions by revealing the contents of each book, culled
from further discarded billboard material, cut and drawn on, creating a dense
and unique work of hyper-collage. It is the abstraction of representation,
together with a physical handling of images, that is at the core of Mein's
practice.
Special thanks to Mariana Lanari, at Lanari Editions, for the collaboration and production of Miopia.
Jessica Mein received an M.F.A. from Hunter College and her BA from Duke University. Recent shows include Off Camera at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia, Cegueira at Gallery Pfeister, Denmark, Feldman Gallery at PNCA in Portland, Oregon and Natureza Morta in Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago. Her videos have been shown at MoMA in New York, Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Upcoming shows and screenings include El Museo's Biennial,Number Five: Cities of Gold and Mirrors, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf. Germany, and Big Screen Project with the Drawing Center, New York. She showed previously at the gallery in 2008 in a two-person exhibition with Carlos Bevilacqua. She lives and works between Brooklyn, Dubai and Sao Paulo.
